The Chroma of Culture -Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii

Color exist to personify the speech of the spirit, all of the harmony, fluidity, that we wish we could express, color encapsulates, regurgitates and lands on and in our memories providing the vivid, vibrancy, that only something this striking could bring.






So I was going to try to explain this but the author at New Art did a much better job of summarizing and defining this wonderful artist and his art.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer born in 1863. After studying chemistry with Mendeleev and later with Adolf Miethe - one of the crucial figures in the invention of color photography - Gorskii started developing his own techniques and processes of color photography, giving it a quality that even impresses even today.

PS. The amazing color bars that appear on some of the pictures are the result of Prokudin-Gorskii's ingenious process, which consisted in taking three subsequent, monochromatic photographs, one with a green filter, one with blue and one with red. He then superimposed the three projections using lamps with a corresponding filter system. I adore these frames, unfortunately some of the images needed additional computer editing (by the Library of Congress) and in this version were cropped.